Mazzarella and the Media of Self-Representation

Mazzarella asserts that mediation is a constitutive process of social life. It is ubiquitous, informing the ways in which we interpret and understand each other and ourselves. Mazzarella is interested in the relationship between mediation and globalization. How does one culture portray itself when it contact with another? Do differences and similarities become exacerbated or reduced? Does Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities ring true? This question must be asked with forces of globalization constantly entangling cultures. Specifically, Mazzarella looks at the affects of literature and cinema, as well as internet and newer technologies.

Commonly, in academia concerns regarding the affects of globalization on culture are discussed. Mazzarella on the other hand believes that globalization has the potential to revitalize the discipline of anthropology, because mediations of representations emerge in informants’ lives and work. For example, in Anthropology 200 I watched a documentary about the Kayapo. When anthropologists were working with the Kayapo to create an ethnographic film, they started to notice that the subjects were controlling the ways in which they were being portrayed. Through mediation, they were able to construct the individuals in such a way that they believed reflected positively upon their tribe. Once anthropologists recognized the ways in which the Kayapo were actively participating in mediation, they decided to try an experiment; they gave film equipment the Kayapo to they could film self-documentaries. The Kayapo were then able to fully control the process of mediation and portrayal of their social life, in a way best suited to them.

Globalization creates a constant struggle between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization; something cultural anthropologists cannot seem to agree upon. Is globalization in fact, causing cultures to become more similar or are new cultural lines being drawn to divide groups? Mazzarella argues that the process of globalization is revealing conceptual problems at the core of our assumptions about what a “culture” actually is. A culture is not bound. Rather, a culture comes into contact and interacts with other cultures, causing the culture to further constitute itself. As Mazzarella puts it, mediation involves a dual relation; simultaneous self distancing and self-recognition. The way in which a culture is mediated enables and constrains the control and dissemination of information in particular and specific ways.

The Value in Graffiti

Historically, graffiti has been an artistic site of resistance, often associated with poverty, crime and areas of low socio-economic status. Graffiti first came to public attention in the late 1960s mainly in New York City and as an outgrowth of political radicalism and of black and Hispanic empowerment and identity (Ferrell 101). Contemporarily, graffiti is generally accepted or rejected depending on the space where the graffiti exists. Let us compare the graffiti present on the UBC campus and graffiti on the downtown east side. On campus, it is fairly rare to see graffiti. If one does encounter graffiti, it is often removed or painted over within a week. During the summers, I work for UBC’s Student Housing and Hospitality Services. Graffiti is certainly always prioritized over other tasks, often including pests and building heating. On the DTES however, graffiti is everywhere – store fronts, sidewalks, alley ways, garage doors, garbage disposals and so on.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hopeinshadows/3368096459/in/set-72157615639597344/

© Pivot Legal Society, 2003

Photo Credit: Bronwyn Elko

This particular example was part of the Hope in Shadows project in 2003. Photographers on the DTES entered a photo contest to have their photos featured in the Hope in the Shadows calendar. Then, homeless or low income street vendors sell the calendars in order to make a living.

Graffiti is regulated differently within various social spaces. If a space is represented to have a specific societal value, the space is usually regulated more heavily, such as the case at the UBC campus. On the other hand, spaces such as the downtown east side which Vancouver apparently values less, are less strenuously regulated for the presence of graffiti.

In recent years, we have begun to see a shift in the understanding of graffiti. While previously, graffiti was viewed as a crime, the artistic value within graffiti is slowly gaining recognition. Ferrell argues;

Graffiti has attracted both artistic and moral entrepreneurs. The former sought to entice graffiti writers to paint on canvases and be sold in galleries; the latter used graffiti as a sign of urban disorder and argued for its suppression as a first step in reasserting law and order against unrestrained youth and assertive members of minority groups (Ferrell 101).

It is important to consider the struggle between the artistic and moral entrepreneurs. Essentially, moral entrepreneurs desired to continue to use graffiti as a site of resistance, a sort political stance. Artistic entrepreneurs on the other hand, aimed to appreciate graffiti, but only in condoned and acceptable places, for example on a canvas to be displayed within a gallery. In this realm, graffiti loses its essence of resistance.

Recently, I have begun to notice condoned forms of graffiti on the sides of buildings, often guised as “murals.” The following example is a picture I took while traveling through Germany.

Photo Credit: Chelsea Ousey

This mural/graffiti was located on the side of Wombat’s hostel in Berlin. As graffiti, this piece loses its currency of resistance but rather is valuable in its artistic styling. Located in a young and trendy area of town, the hostel contracted out local artists to do this work, in order to discourage the impromptu graffiti that would have otherwise taken place. Similar pieces can be seen along East Broadway and Commercial Drive and surely other places within Vancouver that I have yet to seen.

Graffiti is slowly coming to be valued within Vancouver’s society. While I appreciate the artistic value in graffiti, I find it problematic that it is only valued by the greater society when it is continuously and heavily regulated. As “condoned” or artistic entrepreneurial graffiti as Ferrell calls it, becomes more popular within Vancouver, it loses its currency of resistance by operating within the realm of social acceptance.

Works Cited

Elko, Bronwyn.

2003. Hope in the Shadows. Vancouver: Pivot Legal Society.

Ferrell J.

1993. Crimes of style: Urban graffiti and the politics of criminality. New York: Garland.

The Pussycat Dolls and the Subsequent Trivialization of Slumdog Millionaire

In The World of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin argues that, “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (2). I have considered this statement in terms of the Pussycat Dolls’ version of Jai Ho (You Are My Destiny) and the original version of Jai Ho created for Slumdog Millionaire. The Pussycat Dolls’ version lacks the context that makes the original Jai Ho special and meaningful, and trivializes the story of Slumdog Millionaire.

In the film, Latika and Jamal manage to find each other after immense challenges such as poverty, the Bombay Riots, gangsters, the sex trade, crime lords and corrupt interrogation. The Pussycat Dolls’ version takes an epic love story fraught with seemingly insurmountable obstacles in Mumbai and turns it into a teenage girl’s dream. The lack of context romanticises the story and ignores the numerous challenges that Latika and Jamal faced together, which in turn created a bond between the two of them. The Pussycat Dolls’ version of Jai Ho (You Are My Destiny) forgets Latika’s agency as a young woman living in poverty in Mumbai. There is no mention of her strength, courage and independence ostensibly visible throughout the film. Latika’s agency is replaced with the Pussycat Dolls’ dependency present within the lyrics:

You are the reason that I breathe

You are the reason that I still believe

You are my destiny...

Catch me, catch me, catch me

C’mon catch me, I want you now

I know you can save me

Come and save me, I need you now

I am yours forever, yes forever I will follow

Any way and any day, never let go

In the reproduced lyrics, Latika’s agency is replaced with subservience and dependency upon others. Through-out the film, she appears as nothing but independent and capable, certainly never asking to be “saved” by another.

In Global Ethnoscapes Arjun Appadurai argues:

More persons in more parts of the world consider a wider set of possible lives than they ever did before. One important source of this change is the mass media, which present a rich, ever-changing store of possible lives, some of which enter the lived imaginations of ordinary people more successfully than others (53).

Certainly, this is true to some extent. While I would argue that it was fairly unsuccessful for the reasons aforementioned, The Pussycat Dolls had the chance to view Jai Ho, interpret it and finally represent it from within their imaginations. However, Appadurai fails to recognize that this ability to imagine a wider set of possible lives is uneven. Let us assume that Jamal, Latika and Salim are real individuals living in Mumbai, India, in similar impoverished conditions. The Pussycat Dolls come from upper class backgrounds, in a developed country. Jamal, Latika and Salim come from a poverty-stricken background often without the basic necessities to live. In this, the Pussycat Dolls are exposed to mass media that Appadurai argues presents an ever-changing store of possible lives. On the other hand, Jamal, Latika and Salim are not exposed to these sorts of mass media. While these characters obviously had some exposure to the media, since Jamal was a fan of the Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan, their lack of exposure to education and other forms of media was visible when they found themselves at the Taj Mahal and did not know what they were looking at. As Jamal explains to the police inspector, knowledges are informed by locations. The imagination of an individual is very much informed by their accessibility to the mass media.

Works Cited

Appadurai, Arjun.

Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology. In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Arjun Appadurai, ed. Pp. 48-65. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.

Benjamin, Walter.

2011[1936] The World of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm, accessed January 22^nd, 2011.

Pussycat Dolls

2011[2009] Jai Ho (You Are My Destiny). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc5OyXmHD0w, accessed January 22^nd, 2011

Slumdog Millionaire

2011[2009] Official Jai Ho Music Video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRC4QrUwo9o, accessed January 22^nd, 2011

Uninformed and Complicit

January 11^th, 2011

Within journalism exists rhetoric of truthfulness. It is the idea that journalists are capable of supplying the viewers with "true stories" that are authentic and that these stories can be translated from one end of the globe to another. This appears to be the motive within this Al Jazeera English video I saw on the news and relocated on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40GEQqWMKIs

Journalist Sebastian Walker is attempting to condense a very complicated Haitian crisis into a short one minute and twenty-four second news clip. This process appears to be common to many journalists’ work; presenting indisputable “true” and horrifying stories that people in the Western world need to hear. While I agree that it is important that those from privileged parts of the world such as the West not turn a blind eye to devastating epidemics, natural disasters and political uprisings, I contest the ability for reports to bring back wholly truthful stories. Rather, journalists are capable of merely sharing opinions and accounts from the outside. These accounts are often context-less and relatively uninformed. In the short Al Jazeera English video, viewers are given bare bone facts surrounding the outbreak of cholera in Haiti. Walker describes the horrifying outbreak of cholera in a country that is, “already on its knees,” where he saw “two patients die in the space of an hour” (2010.) Further, he states that the hospital is overwhelmed with cases (Walker 2010). While this is indisputable the statement lacks context. It ignores the Haitian’s government’s agency in this event, the political structure within and outside of Haiti, the involvement of the United Nations, as well as the humanitarian aid working with the overwhelmed hospitals during the cholera outbreak. Also, it failed to mention that this area was not affected by the earthquake, merely side-stepping it by saying, “officials are concerned that it could spread to areas affected by the earthquake” (Walker 2010).

In Alms Dealers, Philip Gourevitch argues that the humanitarian ideal in practice was pure and unambiguous (109). Similarly, coverage of events which require humanitarian aid are attempting to purely and truthfully present events to the rest of the world. In the Al Jazeera English clip, Walker is confronted with a humanitarian disaster and attempts to present himself as an objective outsider (Gourevitch 106). However, he uncritically accepts the work of the hospital and fails to further investigate important questions such as who can be served at the hospital, how are patients prioritized, and information regarding the health care systems of Haiti.

Gourevitch argues that the graphic suffering of innocents made an inescapable appeal to the conscience in the case of Biafra which created the humanitarian aid business today as we know it (102). Further,

...in 1967, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the world’s oldest and largest humanitarian nongovernmental organization, had a total annual budget of just half a million dollars. A year later, the Red Cross was spending about a million and a half dollars a month on Biafra alone...(102).

News reports such as the Al Jazeera English clip discussed here indirectly support humanitarian aid ventures such as the Red Cross. The viewer is encountered with eerie images of people deathly ill. While there is no mention of Red Cross or something similar viewers watch an “objective” and “indisputable” report on the news surrounding the cholera outbreak in Haiti. Then, when the viewer comes in contact with perhaps a Red Cross commercial or the Canadian Red Cross website they are told to “donate now” as news lines below run stories of the Haiti’s misfortune.

Uninformed and context-less news coverage on Haiti is complicit in created an ineffective environment in which the cholera epidemic cannot be managed. This is due to a failure to be critical of the humanitarian aid they are indirectly supporting. As Yoleen Surena interviewed in the Al Jazeera English clip, “they don’t know what we are dealing with” (Surena 2010).

Works Cited

Alms Dealers: can you provide humanitarian aid without facilitating conflicts?

2010 The New Yorker, October 11: 102

Surena, Yoleen.

2010 Interview by Sebastian Walker. Haiti struggles to contain cholera. Al Jazeera English, October 22.

Walker, Sebastian.

2010 Haiti struggles to contain cholera. 1.5 min. Al Jazeera English. Saint-Marc